It is known in the motion picture industry to manually identify the main subject of an individual image or frame of a motion picture, and then to manipulate the color values to obtain a desired emphasizing effect. The process is accomplished manually and usually requires the digitization of the image or frame into pixels and then manually outlining the subject of interest using a graphic user interface on a computer terminal. The image pixels are then modified by changing the identified subject with respect to the background in some predetermined manner. In recent motion pictures, the effects of blurring the background or changing the background to black and white have been used. An example of the results of this technique can be seen in the motion picture “Pleasantville”. This manual process is very labor intensive and hence costly to implement. Yet, the effect is so desirable that motion picture producers are willing to invest the expense to produce images having these effects.
There are several other similar effects that could be envisioned for use to good artistic affect. However, whatever affect is desired, the labor intensive manual effort that is needed greatly limits the use of such techniques. Of course, these effects are also desirable for use in still photograph by amateur or professional photographers. Such use is similarly limited by the cost and inconvenience of the manual technique. In the case of still images, there is not only the manual labor required to manipulate the image, but the effort needed to learn to use software that is capable of doing such manipulation. If such image manipulation is not done regularly, the user has a certain amount of re-learning to do each they desire to manipulate an image.
Consequently, a need exists in the art for an automated method of processing an image having pixels to emphasize a main subject in the image.